In this print, Knight, Death, and Devil, a full armoured knight on horseback strides forwards through a rocky landscape. He is poised with a determined stare. His left hand clutches the reigns of his muscular steed while the right hand holds a lance. His sword is sheathed, but it is positioned close to his side. The figure of Death rides to the right of the knight on a nag. His face resembles an exposed skeleton with no trace of flesh to cover his bones. A crown intertwined with slithering serpents rests upon his head and he is dressed in a light colour. The frame of his body is turned towards the knight. He gestures to him with an hour glass with half the time already spent. The horse on which Death sits is bowed, inviting the viewer to follow its gaze to the bottom left corner of the composition, where there is a skull, and a sign containing Dürer’s signature and the date of this engraving (1513). Continuing along the bottom of the composition, the Knight’s dog is seen keeping pace with his horse. Bringing up the rear is the Devil, who lurks behind the horse. His body is adorned with horns and other grotesque appendages and his eyes are wide-opened, transfixed on the knight riding before him. The trio in the foreground comprise the majority of the composition, but in the upper register, there is a far off town, high on a hill.
Western printmaking began in the early part of the fifteenth century. Engraving and woodcutting were the two most commonly used mediums for printing. However, engraving with a burin gave the artist a certain degree more of sophistication and expressive detail that was harder to mimic on a woodblock, whose porous surface is not as pliant as a copper plate. Art Historian, Charles Talbot notes that the intaglio process of engraving, requires considerably more time and effort in application. Furthermore, ‘it took considerably more pressure in the press to draw the ink from the incised lines than was needed to print a wood-block’ (Talbot 1971, p.14). One of the other main benefits of engraving were the numerous impressions that could be made from one plate. While each impression might have a slight degree of variation from the next one, hundreds of impressions were made from Dürer’s engraved plates and retained the highest level of quality.
The horse is the centre of this composition, and is its focal point. Unlike Dürer’s Four Horseman of the Apocalypse 1498, which obscures the hind quarters of the horse, this engraving depicts its entire anatomy. Art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin writes of the horse:
It gives the impression of being distinctly Italian—not so much in its details, such as the Italian head, but much more in the articulation of the whole form, the way the head and neck are connected and also the neck and body, the way the shoulders can be clearly seen and the legs are separated from the horizontal mass of the body. (Wölfflin 1971, p.198.)
The meticulous attention to the horse’s musculature, the engaged and contracted tendons, all represent Dürer’s mastery of equine proportion. Dürer also employs light and shadow to illuminate the figures and the surrounding scene. Art historians, Gaillard Ravenel and Jay Levenson note, ‘Dürer presented his ideal horse against a dark landscape background, but, as a result of its darker tones and competing figures, the horse does not stand out without comparable prominence’ (Ravenel et al 1971, p.144).
Religious devotion is the leading interpretation of the Knight, Death and Devil. Art historian Jeroen Stumpel writes that ‘the horseman can probably be associated with the ideal image of the Christian knight, who fearlessly – and without a backward glance – follows the path toward salvation, never allowing himself to become distracted by Death, nor by the devil’ (Stumpel 2013, p.258). Dürer himself referred to this engraving as Reuter, which means rider. It is widely believed, as Charles Talbot notes, that ‘Hermann Grimm, in 1875, introduced the opinion that the idea for the knight, threatened by Death and the Devil, was inspired by [Desiderius] Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani or “Handbook of the Christian Solider,” which was first published in 1504’ (Talbot 1971, p.143). Devoted Christians, in the service of God, would have seen this engraving as a call to faith, warning them against external temptations.
Knight, Death, and Devil is one of Dürer’s three ‘master engravings’ (Meisterstiche), along with Melencolia I 1514 and Saint Jerome in His Study 1514. Although these works are not a series as such, scholars have attempted to link the trio together, seeing them as representing moral, theological and intellectual pursuits respectively. Art historian, Jeroen Stumpel writes of the Meisterstiche that, ‘despite various theories, no thematic relationship between the three compositions has ever been identified. Only a single object is found in all three: the hourglass, which shows that about half the interval of a life time has already run out’ (Stumpel 2013, p.258).
Further reading
Gaillard Ravenel, Jay Levenson, ‘Catalogue of Prints’ in Charles Talbot (ed.), Dürer in America: His Graphic Work, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art Washington, District of Columbia 1971, pp.111–98.
Henrich Wölfflin, The Art of Albrecht Dürer, London 1971.
Jeroen Stumpel, ‘Medium, Meaning, and Meisterstiche. An Essay on Dürer’s Art of Engraving’ in Jochen Sander (ed.), Albrecht Dürer His Life in Context, exhibition catalogue, Stradel Museum, Germany 2013, pp.250–8.
Trudy Gaba
The University of Edinburgh
December 2016
